In the absence of any organized government or law enforcement agency, the nomadic desert-dwelling society of Bedouins must provide its own law and order. A research fellow on Bedouin culture at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, Clinton Bailey here offers the first comprehensive English-language study of the Bedouins and their laws, culled from material gathered over 40 years of fieldwork. Bailey analyzes the logic of these laws by comparing them to the laws of the culture from which they were drawn and here presents 185 cases and conflicts to shed light on the rules for maintaining the law, as well as the penalties for breaking them.